I can't help but think a logical thing for Intel to do would be to get more support out there for developers to take advantage of the silicon.
Processors get fatter and have more features, but in practise you are dealing with 5, maybe 10 layers of abstraction by the time you are grinding your problem in API and IDE of choice. Can you rely on all those layers to take advantage of fatter silicon?
NVIDIA caught onto this and produced the widely used CUDA API, which very definitely lets you exploit the hardware without too many headaches.
By contrast Itanium, (amongst other causes) failed software, particularly compilers could not take advantage of the systems features.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
